Learning to Bear the Pain of Others: Biomedical and Theological Considerations of Vicarious Suffering Among Medical Trainees

Charles Zimbrick-Rogers, M.D., Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Naval Medical Center Portsmouth and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences

Many who enter a healing profession do so with a goal of alleviating suffering. However, engaging with the suffering of others may cause significant distress for medical trainees, and the phenomenon of secondary traumatization in medical providers is well documented. Spiritual and/or religious medical trainees may draw on the resources of their faith traditions in seeking to grapple with meanings and sources of suffering beyond biomedical etiologies. Minimal attention has been paid to the complex intersections of spirituality and medical training, particularly in regard to vicarious suffering experienced by medical trainees. This paper is a preliminary effort toward developing a theoretical framework for engaging this gap.

This paper is an autoethnographic engagement with my own experiences as a religious person, medical trainee, and now medical educator in dialog with the disparate worlds of biomedicine, anthropology, and theology. First, I explore the ways in which seeing and engaging with the suffering of others can, through a mechanism of secondary traumatization, lead to a reevaluation of the self and deeply held beliefs. Second, I attempt to complicate our understanding of trauma and secondary traumatization through engagement with Didier Fassin’s critique of the moral economy of trauma language and Shelly Rambo’s understanding of trauma as rupture. Third, I place my own experiences engaging with suffering people and medical trainees in conversation with Rambo’s understanding of pneumatological remaining in the face of trauma and Emmanuel Levinas’ understanding of approaching transcendence through the face of the Other. In this way, I propose a lived theology approach for thinking through the complexities of vicarious suffering in medical trainees. It is my hope that such an approach may prove fruitful in enabling medical educators to better support trainees in their own development as holistically healthy and empathetic practitioners.